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Colonialism

Mrs Cook by Marele Day & Carrion Colony by Richard King

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October 2002, no. 245

We readers ask a lot of our writers. We know what we like, but sometimes we prefer something new. We want to be taken along on the ride, but won’t tolerate being taken for a ride. We may want to learn something, but we don’t care to be lectured. We like a bit of fun, but can’t bear to be mocked. Yet we can also be quite generous. We don’t mind giving up control of our lives for the few hours it may take us to read a book, letting the writer take the tiller for a while. We are willing to believe in the events and characters the writer creates, to think and feel what the writer tells us to. And we go along with the greatest fiction of all: that the writer is omniscient and omnipresent. Not only do we collaborate in this great delusion, we encourage it.

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It’s Not the Money, It’s the Land by Bill Bunbury & Pila Nguru by Scott Cane

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September 2002, no. 244

The pastoral frontier continues to be a site for stories of nation-building. In Mary Anne Jebb’s and Bill Bunbury’s books, the stories are not so much ‘how we got the country started, boots and all and not half-hearted’, but about the limits of liberalism and questions of indigenous rights. Having worked for many years with eighteen Aboriginal ‘storytellers and key characters’, Jebb returns to the region evoked by Ion Idriess in Over the Range: Sunshine and Shadows in the Kimberley. In 1937 that travelogue–history sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. No apologist for colonisation, Jebb shows us its difficulties.

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An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land by Andrew McMillan & Yorro Yorro by David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic

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September 2002, no. 244

The reissue by Magabala of the late David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic’s Yorro Yorro coincided with the publication of Andrew McMillan’s An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land. These radically different books address cultural exchange between Aboriginal and settler cultures. On one level a banal travelogue, Yorro Yorro is transfigured by the language and stories of Mowaljarlai, and fits, to an extent, into romantic discourses about indigenous people. It is no surprise that it is published in the USA by Inner Traditions International, a leading publisher of books on indigenous cultures and self-development. An Intruder’s Guide is a more sober piece of writing: McMillan combines textured descriptions of Yolgnu politics and life with dry but lucid historical narrative.

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‘He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.’ Thus Donna Merwick invites us into this sad and instructive tale about the colonial Dutch world of North America.

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Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.

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In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?

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The British exploration of the Pacific Ocean between 1764, when Byron sailed, and 1780, when Cook’s third circumnavigation concluded, and the colonisation of New South Wales from 1788 onwards, effectively set agendas in discovery and settlement which France and Spain had to emulate if they were to continue as Britain’s imperial rivals.

Spain’s effort to match the British agenda was spectacular, but short-lived. The expedition under the command of Alejandro Malaspina that it sent to explore in the Pacific and to report on the state of the Spanish empire (1789–94) was perhaps the best equipped of all the grand eighteenth-century voyages, but its commander fell victim to political intrigue on his return; and oblivion settled over its results. (Only now are its journals, artwork and collections being fully analysed and published.)

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In a recent history of punishment in Australia, Mark Finnane observes that there is a ‘seemingly inexhaustible vein of convict history’. This has been especially true most recently of the history of convict women and the increasing number of accounts which are now being published in this field is to be welcomed. These studies offer a corrective to histories which have relegated convict women to a footnote, and, perhaps more significantly, some historians have attempted to reconceptualise and recast our understandings of colonialism, gender, power, and sexuality during the nineteenth century.

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The Chief Justice of New Zealand opened his recent judgment on the attempts to suppress the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright with the comment that it was ‘probably the most litigated book in all of history’. That may be correct; although I suspect that the Bible may yet have a slight edge.

The Bible was probably the first book carried from the ships of the First Fleet when they anchored in Sydney Cove in January 1788. From reading the catalogue which accompanies this exhibition, I get the impression that the Rev. Richard Johnson – sent to this country by an organisation with the engaging name of the Eclectic Society – was rather like those annoying people who nowadays clamber aboard a jumbo jet struggling remorselessly on with the entirety of their worldly possessions. Johnson was just such a man. He carried with him no less than 100 Bibles, 350 New Testaments, 500 Psalters, 100 Prayer Books and 200 Catechisms – all made available to him by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Amongst his most precious possessions were twelve copies of Bishop Thomas Wilson’s An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians. Sadly, guns and hangings all too soon quickly replaced words and books in the relationship between the newcomers and the indigenous inhabitants of the Great South Land.

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On April 8 1901 the LMS missionary James Chalmers was eaten by Goaribari villagers in the Gulf of Papua. The cannibalistic nature of Holy Communion notwithstanding, the Christian administrators of British New Guinea conducted several punitive raids against the offending gourmets during the next three years. In consequence there were a lot of people killed by arrows and guns, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, and a suicide. The suicide was that of Judge Christopher Robinson, the first Australian to act as Administrator in New Guinea. With a revolver he blew his brains out at the base of the government flagpole in Port Moresby on June 20 1904.

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